1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a file conversion method, a data converter, and a file display system for extracting data, which can be handled by a device having a limited display capability, from a file composed of a plurality of pieces of data displayable on a display unit with a start and an end of each piece of data indicated by respective identifiers and for outputting the extracted data to the limited-capability device.
2. Description of the Related Art
The network called the Internet is now in widespread use, and users have an easy access to a diversity of information through personal computers over the Internet. Information the user monitors using a software program called Web browser is described in the HTML (HyperText Markup Language).
The HTML document is associated with an identifier called tag. The tag determines the structure of each document. Specifically, when the user monitors a HTML document using the Web browser, the font, the size, and the color of a text, and the location of an image file are described by the tag. The tag determines the structure of the text information and image information on a Web page monitored by the user.
The use of mobile terminals becomes widespread, and the user has an immediate access to various pieces of information in transit or at a destination of a travel. To gain access to desired information on a mobile terminal, the user needs to input information on the mobile terminal. As a means for collecting information to the mobile terminal, the user may use a personal computer. The user connects the mobile terminal to the personal computer to download the desired information to the mobile terminal.
When a user transmits, to a mobile terminal, Web page information which has been obtained to a personal computer from a particular server, it is necessary to reorganize the information into data displayable on the mobile terminal and then transmit the data to the mobile terminal. The user must select required data from unnecessary data, and transmit the required data only. Further, the user must reorganize the extracted data in a size and format displayable or easy to see on the mobile terminal. The user is therefore forced to perform a variety of jobs from acquiring home page data to transmitting the reorganized data to the mobile terminal.
Although the Web pages provided over the Internet are written in the HTML, their formats are diversified. Specifically, the contents provided by the servers are varied in HTML document structure from server to server. The user is forced to use different extraction methods and different shaping methods from content to content to reorganize the data for the mobile terminal.
When the user uses a browser, a home page service on the network may be preregistered as a bookmark on the computer. Since the bookmark is stored in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or character strings, the user has difficulty identifying the content provided by the service at a glance.